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Art Young

American cartoonist and writer (1866–1943)

Arthur Henry Young (January 14, 1866 – December 29, 1943) was an American political cartoonist.

Art Young (circa 1914)

Quotes

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  • Capitalism is an old man gone insane. Terrified and desperate, but still able to fight with a vicious strength, as a last chance he runs amok. Now it is in Spain, as it was in Italy, Germany, and Austria. With no thought of consequences, this monster is on his final rampage to rule or ruin, and to ruin all hope of progress the world over is preferable to a confession of having outlived his time. That is the scene as I see it.
  • There is an humble looking man hanging around the press headquarters of the conference (Guess who it is?-Ed.) He has a policy of his own-a crudely expressed and inadequate program that he calls "Toward Peace"-Here are a few paragraphs copied from the first page of his pamphet. "Every nation with a navy ought to destroy three cruisers a year instead of building more. Every tariff ought to be abolished. Nations based on the capitalist-system are anti-social-they breed war." Down with them! The delegates are the wise-men, this humble, ragged outsider is just "queer." The queerer they are the wiser they seem to me.
  • Inasmuch as the years ahead of us look stormy for financial kings, they may be called upon like the kings of old to appear before the people and explain. I here present a speech that I feel can be used to advantage. The speech was delivered by a well-meaning capitalist before one thousand striking employees, and it worked quite satisfactorily-with only a few setbacks: "Fellow citizens and loyal Americans (brick hits a window), the interests of capital and labor are identical (mob hisses). What's mine is yours. (voice: "Like hell.") We all want to see justice done to labor-but we have different ideas as to how it should be done. (silence). Our books are open to you. We are not making any money now or we might meet your proposal half way (mob begins to feel sorry for him). I haven't been sleeping well lately (mob sheds a tear). Money doesn't bring happiness. (Mob disperses-king retires to his banquet-hall for a champagne supper with selected friends.)"
  • Obviously the League of Nations is an attempt to form a trust, to put down international competition. In that sense it is "a step in the right direction" for capitalism. And just as any trust is helpful and sympathetic toward a private individual who is trying to gain his freedom in his own way, just so the League of Nations will help and sympathize with Ireland, or Hungary, or any nation struggling for its own kind of freedom-especially if that freedom happens to be industrial in its nature and not merely political. That is the covenant. It is the last stand of Commercial aristocracy, in collusion with kings, premiers and labor fakirs. But it is not yet plain to American business that we had better form such an alliance. If we do, there must be plenty of reservations. Capitalism of course is already international, so why make a covenant out of it? The next thing you know, people will become international and align themselves boldly against the common enemy. So let us make "reasonable" reservations.
  • An imagination is a brain with wings. Guided by a hand that holds a pen or a voice that directs its dream, it has accomplished all the good that the world is heir to. Imagination soars above the wrongs of the world and things that are, to things that ought to be, and nothing can stop it, till its message is heard. Imagination sees an Atlantic cable and does not rest till it is a fact. Imagination sees a Republic and does not rest till the throne falls and the better order takes its place. Imagination sees a world where "common" humanity shares in the right of suffrage, and it comes to pass. Imagination sees a world without poverty, where the producer owns the means of production and distribution, and, as in all ages, the "practical mind" says "it can't be done." But it has been written and the man with the ballot is beginning to see.
  • If he has illuminated the dark and serious subject with a suspicion of fun-it is meant to convey the hope he feels for all sinners like himself, that some relief of a slightly humorous nature may be found even in Hell.

Art Young: His Life and Times (1939)

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  • I was in deadly earnest about developing my talent, and carousing had no lure for me. I applied myself assiduously to the work in hand, and as I proceeded I became more and more convinced that graphic art was my road to recognition. Painting interested me no less, but I thought of it as having no influence. If one painted a portrait, or a landscape, or whatever, for a rich man to own in his private gallery, what was the use? On the other hand, a cartoon could be reproduced by simple mechanical processes and easily made accessible to hundreds of thousands. I wanted a large audience. . . The prevailing art of that period embraced a thorough, almost photographic, lens-like observance of detail. Gerome, Messonier, Cabanel, Vibert, and Bougeaureau were in the forefront of the artworld then, because they were accurate, precise draftsmen. (Chapter 1. Sunlight and Shadow in Paris)
  • I was to see more of the class struggle in the near future without knowing what it meant. Indeed, at that time, when I was 20 years old, I knew hardly anything except that I had a knack for drawing pictures and was pretty good at reciting selections from books of poetry. (Chapter 8. I see Chicago Justice at Close Range)
  • Everything I read about the Chicago Anarchists in 1886 and 1887 and nearly everything I heard about them indicated that the accused men were guilty. The news reports of the case in the dailies were quite as biased against the defendants as were the editorials. Few who read the charges that some of them had advocated violence against the police realized that they were driven to that extreme by the wanton clubbing, shooting, and killing of workers by the police in the fight of the big industries against the eight-hour day movement. (Chapter 10. Four Dissenters Silenced by the Rope)

Chapter 5. A Small-Town Lad Chooses a Career

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  • With all my self-consciousness about looks (and it maybe a feminine streak that is said to be in every artist), I have long had a dislike for individuals who judge others by surface aspects, whether it be a matter of clothes regarded as incorrect for the occasion, a spot on a shirt-front, or need of a shave. Keeping up appearances all too often is the concern of persons who have nothing else worth keeping up.
  • Novel reading called for wading through too much type. I had no patience for that. The very word "fiction" I abhorred. I wanted truth. Short stories, poems, paragraphs, brief essays, picture books-anything boiled down was more to my liking.
  • I had another year to go when I quit (high) school-but I felt I was getting dumber and dumber each term, and that it would be a waste of time to continue.
  • A good illustrator may draw from models but knows how to forget them.

Chapter 12. I Go to New York with High Hopes

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  • I made about ten drawings with a joke comment or dialogue for every one that I finished and sold. Thus I kept exercising my hand and eye.
  • The flaring hoop-skirt had had its day, but complete coverage was still the fashion, woman's form being left to one's imagination.
  • After a few weeks I decided to graduate myself to the life classes of Kenyon Cox and Carroll Beckwith on the floor above, and strangely enough, no one objected; I just walked in as if I belonged.
  • Inspiration from my youthful partial knowledge of Dore's work had carried me a long way. But now I was becoming acquainted with the political and social satires of other leading graphic artists in England and France-Hogarth, Rowlandson, John Leech, George Cruikshank, John Tenniel, Daumier, and Steinlen, and all of these held important and increasing values for me.
  • Journalism today is for the most part gentlemanly and decorous, in so far as the relations among newspapers in the big cities are concerned.
  • Although I knew that art schools could not make artists, I enjoyed the environment and the thought that I had an aim in life.

Chapter 15. Return to Health and Chicago

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  • Usually politics was my theme, varied now and then, on an off day, by some travesty on prevailing fads.
  • in 1933, fifty-three years after the sweeping defeat of this movement which had reaped so much editorial and oratorical abuse, its supposed evil nature had been forgotten, and Congress voted for the payment of government bonds in currency, one of the demands of the Greenback convention in 1880. And in the intervening years other planks in the Greenback platform had been embodied in government policies or had been generally approved in principle.
  • I have always been sensitive to competent oratory, and from that year to the present time have heard all kinds-most of it I would say, as one of Plutarch's noble Grecians or Romans put it, "tall and lofty like a cypress tree, but bearing no fruit."
  • It seems unbelievable at this distance that we assailed a candidate because he combed his hair the wrong way, but that is a part of the record of mud-slinging in American politics. And I was a participant on the front page of a leading newspaper [The Inter-Ocean].

Chapter 22. I Become Aware of the Class Struggle

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  • To escape from such thoughts I would go back to my drawing board and plunge into the making of pictures. And now I found a new means of escape-lectures and libraries. Both enabled me to get away for a little while from my discontented thoughts because of loss of freedom through wedlock. Lately I realized anew that my education was inadequate. So many questions came up that I couldn't answer, and I needed to fortify myself with such answers. By listening to the lectures and reading a wide variety of books I nursed the seed which had been planted in my mind by Keir Hardie's speech in Denver, and by Myron Reed's discussions of the human struggle there.
  • Speakers for the Social Democratic party provided me with much food for thought. They attacked the whole capitalistic system, showed how its different units combined to exploit the producing masses to the nth degree, and how the distorted or suppressed news to protect this system, of which it was a part. Being loyal to the press, my first reaction to this denunciation was one of resentment, though I had to concede that some of the charges were true.
  • Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.
  • Perhaps no editor has been so guilty of stirring up the baser passions of human beings as Hearst. Often in his early years as an editor and publisher, he did some political arousings on the side of the workers. It helped him get circulation. Gradually, however, he evolved a policy which prevailed over all liberal doctrines that he might advocate-devoting his publications to the will of the big moneyed interests to have and to retain everything that they possessed and to insure their hopes of getting more through their 'superior intelligence'
  • with this feeling, I poised in my mind some other questions as to the soundness of beliefs I had long held, based upon copy-book maxims drilled into one generation of American children after another: "Merit wins...Survival of the fittest...You can't change human nature...The best people...The poor you have with you always...and the whole long line of rubber-stamp moral precepts. What were these but glittering emblems set up by the moneyed class to serve its own purposes? Born bourgeois, my brain had been filled from infancy with the nonsense of super-patriotism, with the lily-white virtues of imperialism added in due time. I had harbored these false values because I didn't know any better. I had been a drifter, innocent and sheep-minded long enough.
  • Now that I was awakening to the realities of the economic struggle, I realized that I could no longer conscientiously deal with certain subjects in the way that editors wanted them handled. I had ideas for pictorial attacks on institutions hooked up with the money power, but there was no sale for these. The few papers which dared strike at the system were small, and had no money to pay for my product. And I had to live and support a family.
  • Where was I headed? I didn't quite know. I had talent, facility, and a desire to produce-but steadily my market was diminishing. I fell back on illustrated jokes, and even here struck a snag. Tramps were no longer so funny to me as they had been. And my attitude toward the farmer had changed-I no longer wanted to depict him as a mere comic character. His life was all too often bound up with tragedy. The Populists had been right in many of the things they had said about the farmer's plight.

Chapter 30. The Censorship Picks on the Masses

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  • we got a hint of how the Espionage Act would be used as a club against people with anti-war beliefs
  • Most of us who were cooperatively bringing out the Masses were agreed upon that. Some channel of protest must be safeguarded for those who had not been stampeded into dumb obeisance to the world's war-makers.
  • Slacker had come into the language as a term of frequent use. Bundles of Hearst newspapers had been burned in Times Square because Hearst was slow in swinging to the Allied cause but in a few weeks he had swung, and American flags were printed all over his daily sheets. So-called pro-Germans were being tarred and feathered by mobs in the West. Frank Little of the I.W.W. executive board had been lynched by business men in Butte, Montana. And new and appalling tales of cruelty to conscientious objectors were coming out of the prisons where they were confined.

Chapter 32. Stifling the Voices Against War

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  • My world had grown small and shaky. I learned what ostracism means. Men and women whom I had counted as friends found it convenient to pass me on the street without speaking, or were brief and impersonal in their conversation. And often I felt that I was being pointed out as a treasonable being to be shunned as one would the plague.
    • While facing a lawsuit
  • The term "Wobbly", said to have been fastened on the I. W. W. members in derision by a Los Angeles editor, had been adopted by them with enthusiasm.
  • Editors of most of the magazines where I had long had entree also shied at my offerings. Sometimes they attempted to explain, but there was no need-it was obvious that they could not afford to continue using the work of one who was being prosecuted by the government on sedition charges. Thus I had difficulty in making a living. But there was one editor who stood by me-Jacob Marinoff, of the Big Stick, a Jewish humorous weekly, which also was under surveillance by the federal authorities.
  • One week-end during that trial I went up to Monroe to see my folks. They made me feel at home as always, doing everything possible to insure my comfort. But I noticed that greetings from some of my old acquaintances around town lacked the warmth of the past. They talked with me nervously and seemed to be in a hurry, as if they might be open to criticism if they were seen tarrying with one who had been accused of disloyalty to his country.

"Epilogue: Watching the Old Order Crack"

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  • Of course clergymen and other paid teachers and moralists admonished us to be upright and unselfish, and for people with good incomes it was easy to condemn those living on the edge of poverty as inferior, impractical, shiftless, and lacking respect for the social code. It was easy to shout thief at the other fellow when you had no temptation to steal-I mean steal in a petty way. But stealing in a big way was often accepted as good business judgment.
  • I found that life was a continual struggle for most of us-and this on a plane not much above that of the struggle of wild animals-and that society dismissed this obvious truth as a negligible factor in determining human conduct as well as our mental and physical well-being. I began to see that this economic battle persisted even in the midst of an exhaustless plenty, and that most humans lived and died trying to succeed in a material sense, in short, to reach the goal of a triumphant animalism.
  • Every one of us is born with some kind of talent. In early manhood or womanhood each individual begins to see a path, though perhaps dimly, that beckons to him or her. All of us have this leaning toward, or desire for doing ably, a certain kind of work, and only want an opportunity to prove our capacity in that direction. These hunches, these signs of one's natural trend, are usually right, and are not to be thrust aside without regret in later life. I am antagonistic to the money-making fetish because it sidetracks our natural selves, leaving us no alternative but to accept the situation and take any kind of work for a weekly wage. We are expected to "make good," which is another way of saying make money. Therefore we do things for which we have no real understanding and often no liking, without thought as to whether it is best for us, and soon or late find that living has become drab and empty.
  • So most of us pray not for riches, but for just enough to assure our living in normal comfort and perhaps a little extra for funeral expenses at the end.
  • I do not think of myself as having arrived at any degree of achievement commensurate with my potential talent and capacity for work. I am just one among the many who have tried to approximate some measure of integrity in a world that is a sorry bewilderment of wretchedness and affluence.
  • During the last four decades of his life-journey, as this chronicle has revealed, it became more and more evident that there was one wrong, one thing over all, standing in the way of honest and contented living the unjust treatment of those who produce the wealth of the world by those who own most of that wealth; and that the continual fight between the moneyed interests and the working people (including artists) was the vital problem of our time. Now, during these recurring and ever-increasing conflicts, is it not obvious that we have to take sides? I think it has come to that, for all of us.
  • I do believe that man is destined to be released for a more ennobling life, when each one of us can go even farther with our talent or natural ability than we thought possible.
  • the change is at hand-the old order is cracking. It has been said that 'the cure for democracy is more democracy'
  • I can see no hope for humanity so long as one's right to live depends upon one's ability to pay the cost of living imposed by those who exploit our daily needs. I think I know human nature well enough to know that the average individual works better when encouraged and praised, and does his worst when humiliated and looked upon as a slave. Some kind of congenial work is necessary to contentment. From the small boy tinkering with the construction of a toy to the old lady knitting, with no thought in their minds of cash payment-we see the desire of human beings to be doing something with their minds and hands. If the continual pressure for monetary gain whenever we render any kind of service were removed, I believe people would enjoy working for the common good. This is demonstrated over and over again in time of floods and other disasters when the call to communal welfare is the only incentive.
  • The horror of unemployment is the final undoing of the worker. When he sees this confronting him he sells himself regardless of the intrinsic worth of his ability. Labor unions and collective bargaining arose to give him some show of power and dignity.
  • Individual development depends upon mass-solution of the economic problems of everyday living. The inventors, thinkers, and the common man have made this world ripe for healthful leisure, and have created far more than enough goods for all. But through all this progress the business man has assumed the right to the lion's share while those who did the creating and hard work were compelled to fight for whatever they could get-or starve.
  • the big war of 1914-1918 was not my war. It was plainly not a war for democracy but for plutocracy; not for peace but for plunder, and to make our country military-minded. It was capitalism's war-not mine.
  • With more and more governments, however crude and experimental, dedicated to industrial democracy and universal brotherhood, the era of peace and joy in living will come on earth.
  • In my youth I hoped for no higher status in life than to be among those who would follow in the wake of Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernhard Gillam, outstanding artists in the field of political caricature. And when in my early twenties I grew familiar with the political and social satires of the graphic artists of England and France across two centuries, these gave even greater stimulus to my ambition. Dreamily I anticipated that my destiny was to succeed as a caricaturist of some influence in public affairs.
  • Sometimes a prosperous individual will say to me: "Any man can succeed in his ambition if he really wants to. Take you, for instance. Haven't you accomplished what you wanted to do?" And I answer: "Yes" Then I have a repentant feeling for saying that because "No" would be quite as correct. I tell him that "Yes" is only one small word of a full, honest answer: only a little part of the whole truth. I point out that I was compelled to waste about half of my life scheming and worrying over the problem of making enough money to keep going, while attempting at the same time to put aside some of it for lean years and old age, like a dog hiding a bone. This exercise of my acquisitive sense, this trying to mix business with creative ability-though it did not strangle my talent-might have done so except for fortuitous circumstances, kind and encouraging parents, limited competition, and an instinct which told me it ought not to be strangled if I could possibly help it. Or perhaps a little bird singing in a tree-top just for joy helped to give me the hint. Finally I achieved a kind of success.
  • Material considerations thwarted me at every turn. It was my money-earning ability that determined my right to exist, and I got through in a way-but what a way! Having spent so much of my time maneuvering to make enough cash with which to live decently, I count most of that effort a hindrance to my development, both as a man and as an artist. Instinctively most men are proud to be able to provide for themselves and their dependents, and I was no exception to the rule. That duty I accepted willingly. Still it seemed to me unworthy of any one to make that the main reason for living.
  • It took me a long time to understand why so much that surrounded me was too ugly to tolerate without protest. But eventually I learned the reason. I saw that the conduct of my fellow-men could not be otherwise than disappointing, in fact parasitical and corrupt, and that most of our troubles emanated from a cause which manifestly would grow worse so long as we put up with it. That cause was Capitalism. Man's natural self-interest. become perverted and ruthless! The motivating principle of business (though not openly confessed), when summed up, meant: "Get yours; never mind the other fellow." I saw, too, that our law-makers and judges of the meaning of the law put property rights first and left human rights to shift for themselves.

"From Art Young's Notebook" (April 11, 1939)

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  • experience proved that those in authority of publishing institutions were seldom impressed by that which was new or even a little different. Of course, they would tell us they wanted "something new" and were "looking for originality," but generally speaking they would accept nothing but the trite.
  • I hope it will not be said of me that my cartoons never hurt. To be a caricaturist all one's life of the kind whose pictures "never hurt" is my idea of futility. It should not be the function of a political caricaturist just to be funny. The operation sometimes calls for cruelty. But to produce a cartoon that is nothing but an insulting burlesque of a public man is not my idea of a forceful cartoon. However, it often happens that a public man serves as a symbol of wrong because of his record and as such he should be a cartoonist's subject, not to be attacked as a man so much as the idea for which he stands. When one feels that everybody, even the most predatory of capitalists, is also a victim of his own system, one's steel is in danger of not being ground sharp enough for effective attack. But not to hurt with an idea and the manner of expressing it proves that the cartoonist is nothing but a court jester whom the money monarchs like to have around, and when he dies they will say "he never hurt."
  • A conviction founded on bitter experience is often overthrown by a passing mood. We forget the sorrow that taught us our truth, and fall right into the same kind of sorrow again. It is easier to bear the loss of something you need than to have something you don't need but can't lose.
  • The unhappy mortal is the one who has not all the freedom his nature wants him to have. He starts to soar and then in a little time is jerked suddenly back by the thought of conventional duty. He's like the pigeon that a hunter tosses into the air to attract other pigeons and then yanks down by the string tied to its leg.
  • Step right up and hit the man you hate most. "I hate a Jew," says one. So he takes a throw at "the kike." "I hate an Irishman," says another, and he drives at "the mick." Another hates an Englishman, another a German or a Japanese; so the devil in human nature spends itself in this way until wisdom touches the human mind and says, "Now calm yourself and wipe the froth from your mouth!" Then one begins to think, and finally learns this truth: that race hatred is one of the lowest and meanest of human passions. Until we learn to judge every individual on his own peculiar merits, we haven't taken a first good step toward social intelligence.
  • There is no bigger lie hurled at discouraged artists by the smug critics than: "Genius will always find its way through the direst poverty." Of course, it has been done, but at what cost to the genius no one else can know. Poverty is stifling, and having too much money can also be stifling, but most paralyzing to the creative faculties is poverty. If it ever acts as an incentive, it is more often destructive.

The Best of Art Young (1936)

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  • While I had no great admiration for my own intelligence or my ability to understand political economy, neither did I have a servile respect for the intelligence of editors and publishers whom I had met, and who expected their writers and cartoonists to conform to a particular policy of their own. Think of spending one's life promoting and propagandizing the prejudices and political "principles" of a Frank Munsey or a Northcliffe or a Hearst! As a choice between accepting the political judgment of the average newspaper owner and my own judgment as to what was best for my country and the future of mankind, I voted in favor of myself. I'd make up my mind, and follow through. But the difficulty ahead was the small demand for my point of view in the editorial offices of successful newspapers and magazines.
  • Though I was always curious about political platforms, statesmanship and the campaign issues which agitated the minds of my elders, at this period in my life it was drawing pictures, composition, light and shade, and all that goes with creative work which was my study and main interest. Ideas were secondary in importance. In my thirties, now living in New York City, with time to think things over, and beginning to experience something of the harsh problems which one with a family must encounter merely to exist, I came to the conclusion that this talent of mine ought to be purposeful and that the use I made of it was more important than having been born with it.
  • As I view them retrospectively, it is some satisfaction to know that I did not spend many years of my life cartooning the trivial turns in current politics. Although a few of these are related to the topical issues of other days, it will be noted that practically all of them are generalizations on the one important issue of this era the world over: Plutocracy versus the principles of Socialism, which in a broader sense is the same old issue that has aroused the talent of artists and writers throughout history: the exclusive arrogance of birth or wealth that humiliates and enslaves the too-tolerant, common man-the same old issue which in this twentieth century is coming to a showdown.

On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Picture (1928)

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excerpt in New Masses (December 1928)

  • September 1st: As I begin these notes, I am where I ought to be in the summer, at my home among the stone-fenced hills of Connecticut. I will be 60 years of age January next. Three things are worshipful-the Sun, giver of life; a Human Being who believes something worth while and will die for it if need be; and Art, the recreator of life. I walked to the village today and noted a gentle rise of my spirits as I watched the butterflies careen through the fields of goldenrod.
  • September 2nd: I look out over the hills this beautiful forenoon. It ought to be a day care free. Nevertheless, a taint of anxiety is in my mind. The rural postman has not brought the right letter. One with a check in it. The thought of expenses and inadequate income persists. This is the blot that is ever before the beauty of the world in the lives of most of us; anxiety that disturbs the harmony with our inner selves over money matters. There is a divine discontent that a humble man of understanding accepts gracefully, but this dollar discontent, this adjustment to a commercial age, is what prevents the artist-soul in all people from expanding.
  • September 18th: To call one a propagandist is generally to dismiss him from the sacred realm of art. The favorite cry of critics, "Oh, he is a propagandist, not an artist." These propagandists against propaganda amuse me. Propaganda is a kind of enthusiasm for or against something that you think ought to be spread-that is, propagated. Your propaganda may be wrong-or not worth while from another's viewpoint, but that is a personal matter. Duty, sacrifice, beauty, bravery, death and eternity-all allowable subjects for poets and dramatists out of which they can fashion works of art. When others do not believe in your enthusiasm your work runs the risk of being condemned as propaganda. There never was a real work of art in which it is not plain that the author wants you to share his loves and sympathies and his ideas of right and wrong.
  • October 27th: When anyone tells me he hates a particular race of people, I can work up a little hate myself-not for the race-but for the one who is talking.
  • October 31st: One has to catch a train in this kind of a civilization. You can't be careless or gay, you must crowd in and go somewhere, or get left on the desert of your dreams.
  • March 1st: Judged by that standard of success which most of the American people accept and believe, I would be classed among the failures. Now past sixty, with an obvious talent and reasonably industrious in doing the work I like, yet never in my life very far from bankruptcy. If I should happen to be a money success when I am old-and the years ahead of me very few-the fact remains the same; in the common vernacular, I lacked brains to get on and clean up; throughout all the years of an average life-time. I belong with the failures-with the man who is sitting at home tonight after his day's work who knows that his wife, his relatives and friends think; "he is a failure." I'm with this man and the whole army of splendid men and women who wear the ragged badge of defeat. I know that some people are successful who deserve to be, but I am with the unadaptable, the out-of-luck, the weary with the money-struggle. I am with them but not sadly because in my vision of a new world there is going to be a different definition of success.

Quotes about Art Young

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  • Only last year we lost the gay, faithful friend and comrade, Art Young, who "kept up with the procession," till the last moment of his life. The very night he died, last New Year's Eve, he mailed me a post card on which he wrote, "Dear Ella-It has been a long road but now I think we are getting somewhere." And then in a corner he put the word "Teheran", which means so much to us.
  • On the twenty-ninth day of December he mailed me one of his unique postcards, Art himself toiling up a big hill with all kinds of war birds and "blitzkrieg" around him. The card is inscribed underneath, "It's a long road, but now we are getting somewhere"...Art had been through many hard places in the "road" with me, and our "comradeship" of so many years is even closer than a family. It is our family...He really loved people, like our mutual friends, Gene Debs, Horace Traubel-Whitman's disciple-Fred Long, and a few others, close, and understanding. Now, all of these comrades have passed out of life and we must keep their memories green, paying more attention to the young people the new generation; that was the strong point in the character of Art Young...Art Young is still in our lives. His work remains. We just have to close our ranks, get a little closer with more understanding love and when the history of the "people's culture" of America is written, Art Young's name will shine very brightly. Because of his great talent in illustrating the struggles of the people against fascism in all its forms-not only in art forms, but also in humorous understanding words-he will be understood and loved by the youth of the future, and we older ones, in spite of loneliness and misunderstanding, shall work a little harder to win the war. The word "remember" was also on Art's card. Yes, we will remember and translate that memory into action.
  • Art Young drew a picture of a complacent cherub carrying a tiny pail of water dipped from the "Ocean of Truth." The pail was marked "Dogma," and my editorial read: "I publish this little picture in answer to numberless correspondents who want to know just what this magazine is trying to do.' It is trying not to try to empty the ocean, for one thing. And in a propaganda paper that alone is a task."
    • Max Eastman "The Policy of The Masses: An Editor's Reflections"
  • Art Young's drawings are published in the principal Army paper, Red Star, the satirical magazine Crocodile, Ogonyok magazine and others. He belonged to those artists to whom working means fighting for justice, and in our time one cannot fight for justice without being an active anti-fascist. Art Young was our friend and comrade-in-arms because his efforts were directed against Nazism. His biting cartoons appeal to the masses. His hard-hitting style is effective not only in his country but far beyond it. His works, impressive for their clear-cut statement of political themes and simplicity of form, can be achieved only by an experienced master. I have on my table one Art Young drawing dealing with the heroic struggle of the Red Army against Hitler's Germany. Hitler is shown in it. This is one of those social caricatures depicting the loathsome character of the Nazi regime with great impressiveness. Drawings such as this expose the rottenness of Hitler's "New Order" and the monstrosity of Nazi crimes. Thus, a fervent anti-Nazi takes part in the great battle waged by freedom-loving nations against evil forces. The artistic intelligentsia has lost one of its outstanding members. But Art Young's work will live on and call upon his young colleagues to take an active part in the struggle against Hitler's Germany for the happiness of mankind.
  • "Sometimes I'm lonely, but I am never discouraged," Art said to my sister Katherine, her daughter Frances, and me, when we were together at what was to be his last supper. He died a few hours later. In retrospect, it seemed as if he unconsciously spoke his own epitaph, not in a somber or foreboding spirit but in his naturally philosophical and calm manner. "I figure I should be able to live another twenty years," he continued, "and I know that in that time I will see socialism spread through the world." Our conversation was desultory-now serious, now gay, but with an undercurrent of the great changes taking place in the world, of which he was so keenly aware...He spoke considerably on longevity that night, of George Bernard Shaw and Mother Bloor and of our mother...He was a consistent and courageous admirer of the Soviet Union and the Red Army and described himself to me more than once as "A non-party Bolshevik." He had an extraordinary capacity to remain friends with people far removed from his social ideas-if they were honest in their views. But he would never sell his talents for what he disbelieved in, no matter how great his personal sacrifices. His friendship with Brisbane was on this basis...Art Young was gentle in manner, kindly and reassuring. But he was a great fighter against injustice, poverty, inequalities, and against fascism in all its forms. He was never downhearted about the progress of the world. He spoke to us rather regretfully that night about having to sell his little place in Connecticut where he had always planned to have a museum for his pictures and which he had started to build, I believe, or at least had designed. "I got a little money to live a little longer," he said. He said once to his friend Marguerite Tucker: "If I was in the Soviet Union I would be a people's artist and would not need to worry about money."
  • Since Mark Twain, have there been many clearer notes expressed of the basic American folk-mind than may be found in the drawings of Art Young? All the virtues and faults of the American people are contained in these shrewd scratchings of a master-pen: the credulity, the good-natured humor, the scorn for windbags, political and ecclesiastical, a sort of generous gambling spirit, an instinctive hatred of injustice, a simplicity and homely barnyard greatness...Art Young carries over into the modern social revolution this native tradition of a cornfed socialism that extends from Father Abraham Lincoln down through Mark Twain, and Bob Ingersoll, Walt Whitman, Thomas Nast, Edward Bellamy, Brann the Iconoclast, Ryan Walker, Carl Sandburg, the old Appeal to Reason and Eugene V. Debs...Going through the capitalist Hell with him, I am shaken with horror and indignation. Only a great imaginative artist could illuminate so plainly the truth we are prone to forget: that we are living in Hell. War is hell. Peace is hell. Everyday life under capitalism is hell. There is no compromising with such a system-it is Hell, and must be destroyed. Art Young can rouse these feelings in any American mind, and I wish more of us could learn to be as effective.
  • He was a great artist with a generous heart full of feeling and understanding. He suffered with the struggles of the downtrodden, and sided with them in their plights. When an injustice had been committed, he flashed his sharp pen and brush against the tyrants and fascists. His art, like himself, had a keen wit that penetrated deeply. Wherever and whenever Art Young's name is mentioned, people, without exception, express a love for the man and his work. He was truly a people's artist...I once asked him if he ever felt lousy about any cartoon he had done, and he told us of one he had been asked to draw for the old Life, when it was a humorous weekly. The editor had asked for a double-page spread, on which he was to draw a comic figure of a Jewish Broadway producer controlling the gay White Way. Art finished the drawing and received a hundred-dollar check which he needed very badly. But he was somehow not very happy about the idea. At that time, Art recalled, we had no political awareness, no organizations that fought anti-Semitism. So he went to the editor, returned the check and asked for his cartoon back. He walked down the street tearing it up, and with every rip he said he felt happy, although hungry. To most of us artists, Art Young was more than a friend; more than a fellow-artist who for so many years had worked with us, with whom we had exchanged confidences. We all had a special respect for Art Young. He carried with dignity our convictions, and in trying times, when some writers of the old Masses and Liberator went sour one way or another, Art Young stood fast, and the artists were with him. The works of Art Young will live, and the principles and spirit that Art Young stood for will remain an outstanding inspiration, an everlasting monument to a great man and a great artist.
  • Art Young was one of the most picturesque and highly regarded cartoonists of his generation, one of the early masters of the medium. Usually forgotten these days, he was, in his day, the subject of a certain amount of sensational news coverage. And he can be credited with a couple of historic firsts, too. But mostly, he was an artist of principle at a time, the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and immediately thereafter, when cartoonists weren't yet particularly noted for doing much more than making funny faces.
    • In his eulogy at last night's service John Haynes Holmes said Mr. Young had spent his life in protesting against wrong and evil wherever he found them, but had always believed in the "goodness of mankind" and held on to a faith in the future success of men in overcoming their obstacles. Mr. Holmes said his life and works were strengthened by his acute, sense of humor, tragedy and compassion, adding: "He was a good man, and when you've said that you've said all you can."
    • in The New York Times (January 5, 1944)
  • For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope...As one looks back across the shambles of the intervening decades, it is hard not to envy them: the fierce young John Reed (journalist) making his prose into a lyric of revolt, the handsome young Max Eastman mediating among a raucus of opinions, the cherubic Art Young drawing his revolutionary cartoons with the other worldly aplomb of a Bronson Alcott. History cannot be recalled, but in this instance at least, nostalgia seems a part of realism. For who among us, if enabled by some feat of imagination, would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?
    • Irving Howe Introduction to Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917 by William L. O'Neill (1989)
  • One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Eastman, Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line...More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Reed, Art Young, and Charles Winter.
    • Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917 (1993)
  • It was in 1917 that my teacher and I first met Art Young at our Forest Hills home. He was a guest whom Anne Sullivan Macy especially welcomed. Her many-faceted personality was an open book to him. Then his delightful kindliness, humor, sudden whims, sincerity, and the dreams of beauty hovering round his fighting citadel endeared him to her kindred spirit. At a time when reaction was riding roughshod over the earth and throttling those who protested against the betrayal of the people's aspiration to genuine liberty by the capitalist empires, Art Young was emerging from his trial for anti-war charges a gentle yet formidable Samson, and I recall the gay courage with which he defied any power to muzzle the thunder and lightning of his art. It was a marvel how many truths he packed into pictures which opened blind eyes to our community of fate and interest with the downtrodden and the toilers of the world. Some of Art Young's drawings were embossed for me, and I sensed vividly the highly individual and forceful manner in which he presented with the brush ideas that he hoped would serve as a ferment in American economic philosophy. My fingers could appreciate his pictorial power in uncovering hell and its network of race prejudice and enslavement. A year never passed during which I was not thrilled by his inventiveness in devising themes that provoked wide discussion and pushed further the painfully slow campaign of education in true freedom among the working people. Little by little the pillars loosened at which his Samson hatred of oppression tugged, and it is devoutly to be hoped that his death has left them irrevocably sagging to their downfall. There is no calculating the might of patient efforts like his which quietly root themselves in the granite of tyranny and crumble it into life-giving soil. Besides the keen-eyed radical and uncompromising idealist there was another aspect of Art Young I knew-his brimming joy in all things friendly and wholesome, all things that foster song, laughter, and poetry. He said the song of a bird or a burst of morning-glories at this door or a sparkle of dew-wet verdure was enough to crowd new ideas into his day, and evening peace flooded his imagination with fantastic beckoning forms in the trees around him. In all moods, places, and activities he sought to make his labors a telling force in a future that would enable everyone with a special gift or genius to achieve a nobler civilization.
  • All day, every day, the circles are in the Square, close packed huddles, voices rising and falling and rising again. "Did y' see Art Young's cartoon in The Masses? That one where two big cops are draggin' a little guy off to jail? One bystander says: "What's he been doin'?" and another guy says: "Overthrowin' the gov'ment." It's a scream!"
    • Rose Pesotta Bread upon the Waters (1945), about Union Circle on May 1, 1914
  • "Tell me the story of your life!" With an owlish solemnity equal to my own, he replied: "I was born in Illinois, studied in Paris,-But the rest doesn't matter-at least not yet? A man must be dead at least fifty years before we can take a human interest in these dry facts of his early life. "I would rather draw political cartoons than anything else;" said Mr. Young. "I believe in the picture with a purpose. There must be a vital idea back of every drawing that is really worth while. I have no patience with these so-called artists who expect intricate technicality to make up for a lack of ideas. In fact, I don't believe in technique at all...Real art is, in the last analysis, simply self-expression. Socialism always has been and suppose always will be the keynote of my work. To me it is the culmination of all radicalism and the thought back of most of my drawings. I have been very fortunate in being allowed considerable freedom in this direction even when employed by capitalist papers. But you see," he concluded naively, "I made that a condition of my work." He summed up the purpose of his work in the following words simplicity and strength. The proud possessor of an idea must present it simply and with sufficient force to make it comprehensible to the proletarian for whom Mr. Young states that all his work is done. "It is the working man, seated by his lamp in the evenings in his shirt sleeves pouring over the evening paper for whom I make my drawings." There was no affectation, no posing, nothing but the most virile and yet child-like simplicity here. Strength and simplicity are, he says the keynote of all good work. And that was the strongest impression of the interview, as it was of the studio, as it is of his work, as it seems to be of the man himself-strength and simplicity.
  • @%&#!! I don't understand. Why would Art Young-the greatest radical political cartoonist in our history need any introduction??? Never mind, I remember now: Art Young was a Radical! Political!! Cartoonist!!!
    • Art Spiegelman Introduction to To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life And Art Of Art Young (2017)
  • Discussing his selection process for work in his 1936 collection of The Best of Art Young he wrote: "I did not spend many years of my life cartooning the trivial turns in current politics. Although a few of these are related to the topical issues of other days, it will be noted that practically all of them are generalizations on the one important issue of this era the world over: Plutocracy versus the principles of Socialism." Art Young might be a bit disheartened to find out that the grand Soviet experiment kinda fizzled. But by having kept his eye on the fundamentals, his cartoons are rarely musty artifacts from yesterday's papers and seem like urgent dispatches from tomorrow's news.
    • Art Spiegelman Introduction to To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life And Art Of Art Young (2017)
  • Even subsequent contact with blacks during a trip to Alabama and his growing social consciousness did little to alter Young's vision of southern blacks, who appeared to him happy-go-lucky primitives; he remained unaware of the hard lives behind their mask of joviality and insouciance.
    • Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (1985)
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